Children from Ireland’s financially better-off families are “sailing away from the have-nots”, the State’s Children’s Ombudsman has warned.
The number of children living in poverty has doubled in the last year, Dr Niall Muldoon told the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal.
“They’re sailing away from us. The haves are sailing away from the have-nots. And children are the ones who suffer there all the time,” he said.
Nearly 5,000 children are currently homeless, even though the State has been running unprecedented budget surpluses in recent years, Dr Muldoon noted.
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“That’s 2,200 families that need to be found a home. That priority has never been given to children, or families.”
[ Child homelessness a ‘national shame’, TDs and Senators toldOpens in new window ]
Family homelessness was “not even an issue” until 2012, when post-crash austerity “kicked in properly” as the State moved away from providing public housing to depending on the private sector, he said.
Currently, it costs the State €350 million a year just to house homeless families in Dublin, but the problem can be tackled, he told the summer school. “It’s not intractable. It is something that can be done.”
The Government is unable to tell the Office for the Ombudsman for Children how much it spends on children, Dr Muldoon said.
“They can tell me exactly what the State spends on every brick in the [National] Children’s Hospital, but not what they spend on children.”
Equally, it can explain that the State’s mental health budget has grown by a fifth in the last five years to €1.3 billion, “which is still about half of what most other countries do, but they can’t tell me what they spend on children”.
Three-quarters of all mental health issues begin in childhood, the summer school heard. “You would think 75 per cent of the budget, or 50 per cent of the budget should be spent on that. It’s not. The reason it isn’t is because it allows the other part of the system to use it as a slush fund if necessary.”
Chris Quinn, Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People, said the homelessness crisis is affecting even more children north of the Border, where 5,000 households are in temporary accommodation and 18,000 are registered as homeless.
“It baffles me as to why we have silence on this. In the South, there’s a huge outcry about homelessness and the housing situation. In the North, it isn’t, but those figures are mind-boggling.
[ Children have ‘borne the biggest brunt’ of homelessness crisisOpens in new window ]
“Poverty’s sitting at about 25 per cent. So, one in four children are living in poverty. One in four children are going to school hungry, whose mommy or daddy is choosing to heat the house, or put the dinner on the table for themselves and their children,” he said.
One in 10 of 11- to 19-year-olds in a recent Northern Ireland survey declared that they would engage in self-harm, with one in eight young people having suicidal ideation: “Our child adolescent mental health waiting lists are through the roof,” Mr Quinn went on.
The consequences of poverty make people age faster, said Prof Rose Anne Kenny, the founding principal investigator of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) and the chair of Medical Gerontology at Trinity College Dublin.
“Children who experience circumstances actually have an accelerated ageing process,” she said. “The children experiencing depression at home, alcohol, drugs, homelessness, uncertainty, et cetera – those children age faster.”
The faster ageing can be tracked biologically: “We’re creating a society, or a section of society, which will not get a chance at any stage unless we get it right now,” Prof Kenny said.
Looking at lessons that can be learned from the United States, Prof Kenny said it has been clearly shown that people who possess a Bachelor of Arts degree die later and are far less likely to die in middle age than people who are poorly educated.
Urging parents to encourage children to read and to read to them, Patricia Forde, the State’s Laureate na nÓg, warned that the number of children who read regularly, or at all, is falling dramatically – largely explained by the rise in social media use.
“My grand ambition is very simple. I would like every child in Ireland to be a reader. And when I say reader, I don’t mean literate, and I don’t mean reading as a hobby,” she told the summer school.
“I want children who are reading for pleasure and who form a habit of being readers so that they grow up with something that is beside them at all times that they can read. So, that would be my magic wand moment.”
